Cutting four 30-minute meetings with direct reports per day day seems like a huge time-saver. You’re adding a whole workday to your week! Limitless potential lies in those hours! But when you stop taking the time to talk to people face-to-face, or at least camera-to-camera, it could leave those who depend on your direction fuzzy on the details.

Instead of spending a focused half-hour talking through their questions and plans for a project, they could spend days and weeks working on something incorrectly, or wavering in focus because they’re not quite clear on direction. That’s a waste of your time and theirs, Saunders says.

When you cancel one-on-ones and compensate with an open door policy, your time investment mimics that of a call center employee who takes requests in the order they are received, instead of an effective manager and executive who aligns his time investment with his priorities.

So you’ve stopped scheduling regular check-ins, shut your office door in exasperation, and started to finally put those gloriously freed-up hours to use, only to find your inbox flooded with little notes and questions from everyone on your team. Where else are they supposed to turn for guidance?

We’d all love to work in a culture where everyone collaborates during a 30-person monthly meeting, speaking up when appropriate and taking turns sharing their progress. But, like that Inbox Zero utopia, we don’t. Some people will never comfortably share their true opinions and wild ideas in a big meeting, no matter how many prompting tricks and how-to books you try on the topic.

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The one-on-one is a chance for shy workers to develop a rapport with their superior–someone who can lobby for them in a traditional workplace structure, and who will pay attention to their unfiltered ideas.

And the deep-thought moments aren’t lost just between you and the person you’re meeting with. Can you imagine getting any creative work done when the above three items are in chaos?